Lamentum
by Maya Sushi
Summary: This is crazy, he thinks, as he steps over the threshold and into the rain. He isn't dry anymore, but neither is his brother. He never has been, and it feels nice to join him, he feels less alone.


_**Disclaimer: **_I do not own Al and Ed. Owning people is a very bad thing to do. I only own _one_ person, I think that's a good number. Good enough to make my bed for me anyway!

_**A/N: **_Yes, so, I was going to make this a chapter in Blood Brothers, but I decided I wanted it to stand alone, because it's kind of written differently than the rest of it, and... I don't know. I just am on a one-shot kick these last few days. It's pretty intense.

Lamentum is the Latin word that lament is derived from, which is easily guessed, but it sounded prettier than lament so I decided to use it as a title inside of the latter.

Okay, so I don't say their names, but you can get the jist of it if you focus. ;) Hope you like it.

* * *

_**Lamentum**_

One brother turns at the sound of the rain, and sees the other outside, face upturned, arms to the sky. This rain is old, this rain has been here before. It's been raining for days. It's been raining for years.

He only hears it some days, and he runs inside and ducks away, trying his best to stay dry. But the other brother, the older brother, he's always heard the rain. He thinks it rains for him, because of him, and he stands in the rain and lets it soak into his soul.

One brother looks through an open doorway at the other. His older brother. He is dry, but his brother is wet, weighed down, he always has been. His light hair drips down with sorrow and plasters tight to his skin, heavy with guilt and blame. This is different somehow, though he cannot put words to it, cannot grasp what it is that could have changed.

(It has been raining the same rain for so very long, millions of minutes, that he has trouble remembering the rain at all.)

This is crazy, he thinks, as he steps over the threshold and into the rain. He isn't dry anymore, but neither is his brother. He never has been, and it feels nice to join him, he feels less alone.

His eyes are trained once more to the lines of his older brother's form. The rain has always been pelting against him, beating him down. He'd never fought back, not truly.

I deserve it, he'd told the younger boy once, it's what I get.

He welcomed it now, with steady, open arms reaching toward each and every speeding mass of hydrogen and oxygen. It fell on his burdened shoulders and his encumbered back. His usually tense form strangely reposed, as if this rain served to mitigate the too-heavy stress that the omnipresent raining had on his body. (Which he could hardly understand, as it was rain all the same, either way.) He wondered idly what was so different about this new rain. It must be cold and wet, and he thought briefly that it was like every other rain, in that it was frigid and unforgiving, but certainly there was something else. Some reason why his brother took this rain gently by the hand, leading it to himself.

No, he wasn't dry anymore, but he found he didn't mind as much as he thought he would. If he followed all this water up into the sky, and fell down with it over again, he might just touch his brother. See the broken things the rain sees, his wounded spirit and his fragmentary heart – caused by his own invective, a masochist of sorts. He filled himself with hate and blame and made it only his own, until guilt began to consume him – he might see these things and figure out a way to mend them. To tell him he needs to come inside and get dry. He's been standing in the rain too long.

(Much, much too long. He feared for him. For he would be sick soon. With life and guilt and death. And he didn't want to be left alone.)

"What are you doing?" one brother said to the other, as he approached him warily through clouds of moisture. No answer came, as was expected, because he didn't know what he was doing – always beneath the steady rain, he assumed something along the lines of "atoning" or "repenting". He'd do anything – just that he would always do what he had to, alone if he had to. Anything for his younger brother, at the very least. He was on a desperate quest to make things right. Let me help, the first brother thinks, the younger brother, but he says, "Come on inside, it's raining."

"I know," admits the second brother, the older brother. He's always known, and there are tears in his eyes but he's more worried about the younger brother than how he feels about this rain that always seems to fall, "What are _you_ doing out here?"

The first boy laughs, mirthlessly however, and his countenance quickly twists back into his unkempt concern, "Trying to get you to come inside," he informs, frowning at his elder, his eyes giving a lecture of their own, "What are _you_ doing out here?" he repeats. Again.

Once more his question is not deemed worthy enough to be dignified by an answer, but the other does speak, and his contemplative, carefully conjured words leave the first speechless, "Do you think she cries for us?"

Then it hits one brother what is so different about the rain, this day, though the other has been waiting for this day for days and days of different rains. The day mother died, he remembers, and wonders at the rain that patters against the metal of his surrogate body, and thinks carefully at his brother's scrupulous question.

(He should have known it was today. That it was this day. From the very moment they woke up this morning until even now his brother's eyes had been screaming "it's all my fault", louder than usual. Too loud.)

"I don't know," he answers honestly, "I hope so."

His brother drops his arms to his side and looks over to stare at him for a very long time, and nothing but silence passes between them, "She's crying for you," he finally says, with the point of a single finger serving to prove his point, it seems, "if anything."

He understands why he'd been welcoming the rain now, holding his arms so wide and letting it fall so freely. Because usually the rain was falling for him, to punish him, to blame him, but today, it was falling for his little brother. Anything for his little brother.

"No," the younger brother doesn't like it when he starts to talk like this. It wasn't his fault and it never would be, and he didn't have to claim it was so, nor did he have to hate himself for it quite as avariciously as he did. It hurt him to watch, "she'd cry for both of us. She loved us."

"I killed her,"

He says these three words so simply that the first brother is almost startled. Says this heavy statement as if he were observing the weather, _"It's raining,"_ maybe. Maybe he'd say back, _"It always is."_

When one brother looks into the other's eyes the simplicity is gone, and is replaced by the burden of pain and guilt in his sad hues. The younger brother shakes his head until his brain rattles, he can hear his thoughts shaking inside of him, hitting walls he couldn't force down. The rain was pounding all around him, so loud against the metal, and he was so far under that when he opened his mind to find the words to speak the liquid rushed down the open orifice and trickled down into his soul. He stopped trying, and would have given anything to frown. He couldn't find the words. Damn the rain.

"That's alright," the older one tells his little brother, who is brimming with concern, "one day I'll show her that I can save you, that I'll do anything, and then she'll cry happy tears for the both of us."

"You don't have to –"

"'Till then," he interrupts, "this rain's for you, yeah?" his brother turns and hands him the most brilliant smile he can piece together and adding a laugh, just for effect, "you should go inside, you're wet."

One brother didn't bother telling the other that he was very much wet himself. He wouldn't have heard him anyway. It was always raining there, where ever it was that he always was.

"Mom, you'd cry for brother wouldn't you?" he asked aloud as he padded his way back inside, to the world of the dry. It was safe here. Warm.

(He didn't think his brother had ever been in here, not since that day, today.)

Of course she would, he thought, and then his brother would finally come inside. Where it was safe. Warm.

"Brother! You're gonna get sick!"

"I'll be right in, promise."


End file.
